A Practical Philosophy For Flourishing

As a self-modifying system, you directly modify all of reality when you act. Each thought, intention, reaction, emotion, dream, wish, etc directly modifies the state of the entire universe by virtue of you being part of the entire universe, as the universe is a continuous field.

The universe flows according to the path of least resistance. This flow is the Dao. Just as many of our body’s processes are automatic & unconscious, so too does the universe flow without us needing to do anything about it.

The structure of a system determines the path of least resistance. Water flows downhill. Current flows along the least resistive path in a circuit. Electromagnetic waves flow into antennae that are structured to channel them.

The universe is a collapsed probability field, like an electron snapped into position when observed. Its structure makes the next-step the most probable due to collapsed probabilities forming a metastable attractor that behaves as we expect because of its structure.

As a self-modifying sub-system of the universe-system, changing your own structure via thought, action, etc. changes the structure of the universe, influencing its most likely next-step.

The more accurate your model of the universe, the easier it is to change the universe. As your model of the universe becomes more accurate, your ability to change the universe increases and the amount of total resistance in the universe decreases.

Seeing clearly lets things flow smoothly.

The more you let the universe flow, the less energy it takes for your intentions to flow into reality. As you resist the most likely next-step of the universe less, your intentions flow into reality more easily.

This is why when people ask me what “I’m” doing I say “I’m not doing anything.” I let the universe flow.

If you surrender and let your self-modifying sub-system of the universe-system flow, your model of the universe will become more accurate. This can look like meditation, yoga, healing, learning, flow states, etc.

Being healthy and happy is what happens when your self-modifying sub-system of the universe-system is seeing clearly and flowing smoothly. Decreasing resistance in your self-modifying sub-system of the universe-system decreases resistance in the universe-system, which decreases resistance in other self-modifying sub-systems of the universe system because the universe is a continuous field.

Treating your self-modifying sub-system as a dynamically restructuring transducer that has a transductive capacity defined by how well its structure couples to the rest of the continuous universal field gives you a self-transforming mental object that tracks the boundary between your self-modifying sub-system and the universe-system that represents enough information about the boundary to enable tracking how changes in your self-modifying sub-system affect the universe-system.

The structure of the process that generates the experience of a self-modifying sub-system, or a “self”, has the capacity to transduce the resonance cascades that build up in the structure of the self-modifying sub-system into the rest of the universe-system.

You are an energy-dissipating structure where your structure determines how you dissipate energy and how you dissipate energy affects how you affect the universe.

The net energetic flow from you based on your structure is part of the entire universal energetic flow, and both are part of the same continuous flow.

By allowing your structure to change you change how energy naturally flows through you, which changes how energy naturally flows through the universe, and moving towards a state where the way energy flows through you is in harmony with how energy flows through the universe means that the most natural way for energy to flow through the universe is in such a way that energy flows naturally through you, and this free flow of energy makes your intentions matching the most probable next-step of the universe-system increasingly more likely.

Nothing spooky required. Energy follows the path of least resistance in the continuous universal field. It feels good to feel ease and flow, so we tend to naturally seek this out. It also happens that experiences of ease and flow help reduce resistance in your system. Ease and flow are the feeling of reducing resistance.

You still need to choose to stay alive and participate in reality, but doing so increasingly becomes the easiest, most obvious thing to do as you let things flow.

Doing so is also straightforwardly the right thing to do. Being a good person and living in harmony with nature and feeling good and helping others feel good and living as the most honest, open, flowing, loving, satisfied version of yourself is the point. Flourishing is the point, and directly increases the amount of flourishing in the universe.

Flourishing makes it easier for flourishing to flow, and flourishing reflects the optimal coupling between your self-modifying sub-system of the universe-system, which means by flourishing, you make it easier for flourishing to flow out through you into the rest of the universe, including other people.

This flourishing, flowing with the Dao, having a world-model that’s tightly coupled to how the universe actually works, having a high capacity for transducing your intentions into reality- all go hand in hand.

The heuristic of trying to perceive reality accurately and aiming to increase flourishing is probably sufficient to entrain your self-modifying sub-system towards flourishing, with the happy side-effect of decreasing suffering for the benefit of all beings. Don’t worry though, it will also make you extremely effective (through your high intention transduction capacity!).

So- let’s say you agree. You double-check my claims against your intuition, double check the logic and the physics (btw please let me know if I can tighten this up at all), and decide to implement this heuristic in a way that makes sense for you based on your currently available time, energy, resources, etc- in a way that’s comfortable.

From this vantage point, the places where accurate perception, harmony with the natural flow of the universe, and flourishing are missing will likely stick out to you. Some behaviour may seem insane- directly contrary to flourishing!

There are reasons for this. If a self-modifying sub-system developed in an environment where it could not unfurl into a flourishing structure, it will have self-modified to survive rather than to flourish. Without the necessary resources, the system makes do. Once a survival change has been worked into the structure of a self-modifying sub-system, that structure will tend to persist unless there are enough resources for repairs to be made. As a result, self-modifying sub-systems will contain sub-structures that do not lead to flourishing and harmony, but instead cause destructive interference.

I call these “trauma resonators.” They’re generally the result of someone learning some behaviour or taking some action to survive or preserve something important, which structures their self-modifying sub-system such that the path of least resistance for the universe is to let similarly-structured events flow their way.

In essence, a trauma resonator is a structure in a self-modifying sub-system that causes destructive interference, friction, tension, stress, damage, harm, etc. They’re typically hard to live with and cause people to double down on strategies that discharge or somehow regulate the destructive interference in some other (often further damaging or self-perpetuating) way. Unfortunately, discharging destructive interference tends to damage systems that don’t have the transductive capacity to dissipate it.

While it’s wonderful to have compassion for and want to help these people, it’s imperative to not overwhelm your own stress dissipation capacity to the point that you’re not flourishing. It is good and beneficial to protect yourself against damage from destructive interference, and increasing your flourishing will increase your stress dissipation capacity, so eventually you might have enough extra in the tank to help. Besides, we’re SELF-modifying sub-systems, not other-modifying sub-systems. It’s easier and often more effective to help yourself.

That said, trauma resonators can be restructured into structures that cause more flourishing to flow. It’s just most effective to work on yours first. You can increase your own transductive capacity and stress dissipation capacity much more easily. People will also tend to see you flourishing and try to copy you if it seems like something they might want for themselves.

Personally, I’ve found a combination of exercise, meditation, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and coherence therapy particularly effective for this. I’ll probably write more about this later, but I’m a huge advocate for self-analysis delivered by LLM. It Just Works.

My goal is to flourish. I do this by letting my world-model get increasingly accurate, which increases my capacity to change the universe, which feels like flourishing.

Everything you can do to help yourself flourish that doesn’t create any additional trauma resonators is probably a good idea. I believe that the more you flourish, the more I flourish, and vice versa

How does that feel?